Ray Ison, Professor in Systems at the UK Open University since 1994, is a member of the Applied Systems Thinking in Practice Group. From 2008-15 he also developed and ran the Systemic Governance Research Program at Monash University, Melbourne. In this blog he reflects on contemporary issues from a systemic perspective.

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

For some time now I have been tracking the rhino and, to a lesser extent, the elephant poaching issue in southern Africa. My interest arose when I encountered these animals first hand in Kruger National Park and worked with colleagues at SAN Parks over a period of years. There have been several recent books which are insightful - Julian Rademeyer's 'Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Horn Trade' (Cape Town, Zebra Press) and John Hanks' 'Operation Lock and the War on Rhino Poaching' (Penguin, South Africa). With Duan Biggs I have almost finished writing a review essay based on the latter.

For an easier way to begin to appreciate why these issues typify a 'super' Ackoffian mess then listen to 'The Horn of a Dilemma' an excellent (in my view) Discovery program on the BBC World Service.

"Across these texts and others, three main objections recur: that the
idea of the Anthropocene is arrogant, universalist and
capitalist-technocratic. Arrogant, because the designation of the
Anthropocene – the “New Age of Humans” – is our crowning act of
self-mythologisation (we are the super-species, we the Prometheans, we
have ended nature), and as such only embeds the narcissist delusions
that have produced the current crisis.

Universalist, because the Anthropocene assumes a generalised anthropos,
whereby all humans are equally implicated and all equally affected. As
Purdy, Miéville and Moore point out, “we” are not all in the
Anthropocene together – the poor and the dispossessed are far more in it
than others. “Wealthy countries,” writes Purdy, “create a global
landscape of inequality in which the wealthy find their advantages
multiplied … In this neoliberal Anthropocene, free contract within a
global market launders inequality through voluntariness.”

And capitalist-technocratic, because the dominant narrative of the
Anthropocene has technology as its driver: recent Earth history reduced
to a succession of inventions (fire, the combustion engine, the
synthesis of plastic, nuclear weaponry). The monolithic concept bulk of
this scientific Anthropocene can crush the subtleties out of both past
and future, disregarding the roles of ideology, empire and political
economy. Such a technocratic narrative will also tend to encourage
technocratic solutions: geoengineering as a quick-fix for climate
change, say, or the Anthropocene imagined as a pragmatic problem to be
managed, such that “Anthropocene science” is translated smoothly into
“Anthropocene policy” within existing structures of governance. Moore
argues that the Anthropocene is not the geology of a species at all, but
rather the geology of a system, capitalism – and as such should be
rechristened the Capitalocene.

Despite these concerns Macfarlane is clear that:'..the Anthropocene is a massively forceful concept, and as such it bears detailed thinking through'.